Paul the Holy Spirit and Gnosticism

Paul the Holy Spirit and Gnosticism

The biggest problem with the Paulist Influence on Scriptures is that we no longer know exactly what we can trust in them. Even the four Gospels are chock full of props supporting the Paulist Doctrines. We are supposed to believe that Christ would rather contradict Himself than do anything in His Lifetime that would cast doubt on the subsequent Letters of Paul.

In most instances the writing of the Gospels and their dissemination was all in the hands of devout and committed Paulists. Of course if we could convince ourselves that these Scribes and Publishers were entirely honest, then our only problem would be in how to reconcile to ourselves a chaotic and contradictory Religion handed down to us by Genuine Revelation. But these Paulists were nearly all Greeks, and at a time when Greeks were not best known for their Honesty. While Greeks today can be assumed to be just as honest as anybody else (and how honest is that?), unfortunately, there was a different cultural and moral milieu back then. Honesty is the end of a long learned process steeped in self-denial and self-sacrifice. All kinds of Civilized Institutions are required to engrain and then maintain this milieu of Honesty. But telling Random and Opportunistic Stories for personal advantage is the first gift found in every clever fellow, and the Greeks were nothing if not Clever.

Then the Teachings of Paul that every Sin would be Forgiven would hardly help in the matter of supporting Honesty, or indeed, any Virtue. For if Moral Responsibility is taken off the table by some quasi-religious doctrine that tosses open the Gates of Hell to any Active Demon able to invoke the Name of Christ, than why not lie for advantage? And these Scribes thought they were lying for the Cause and Purpose of Religion. How could that be wrong? And they probably did not think of it as lying. In the absence of any real documentation or primary sources, or any strong traditions for seeking out documentation and primary sources, they saw themselves as filling in the blanks of what had to have happened, considering that their Doctrines and Teachings had to necessarily be True. They believed Paul and so they adjusted their Picture of Jesus to fit the mold of Paul.

I don’t mean to imply that the entire Ancient World was dubious and suspect. There were some Moral Influences and some traces of High Civilization. There was Zoroastrianism, out of Old Persia. History is uncertain of exactly when it first arrived, but its influence may have already been spreading for over thousand years by the Time of Christ. Old Persia had been crossroads between Egypt, Babylon, India and China and all points in between, and so the Zoroastrian Missionaries of Morality had access to every single one of the World’s more advanced Civilizations. But if we remember our History, Greece was perhaps the most resistant to Persian Influences. Indeed, the Paulist Greek insistence that Sins should be forgiven and Morality Nullified may have simply been an instance of Barbarian Reaction to the growing Moral Revolution – Western Freedom and Individuality standing against Oriental Morality and Order. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I can imagine that the Greek Barbarians longed for the good old days before the dampening influences of Conscience and Qualms, when Rape and Pillage were still just festive pleasures for Self Made Men powerful enough to play with the lives of others.

Now let us look at some of the reasons why we might seriously suspect that there had been some license taken with Biblical Scripture. Probably our best clue comes from the First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 9, where Paul makes it entirely and certainly clear that he wants his Missionaries to tell people exactly what they want to hear. It is the “Be all things to all men” speech. The Truth must take absolute last place. Making the Sale comes first! Act any act, tell any lie. Now, again I am surprised that both in the Catholic and Protestant Worlds there is no moral outrage. They do not hide this Scriptural Passage. I have heard it read aloud in both Catholic and Protestant Churches. Yes, Paul excuses himself on the grounds that he does all this lying and cheating in order to deceive New Converts, but even then! I thought our Civilized World had decided that the Ends do not Justify the Means. Anyway, we need to understand that after Paul had made this Point to all of his Followers, that there were no moral restrictions in the way of making new Converts, then after that fact we can hardly be expected to believe a single word they say or wrote. First Corinthians Chapter Nine puts the entire Bible into the shadow of Doubt.

This problem becomes acute when we try to decide what the Gospels mean in their discussions of the Holy Spirit. Now, from my own knowledge and experience with Mysticism and Spirituality, I could easily suppose that Jesus was describing how He Himself had come by Mystical Knowledge and Spiritual Understanding. By His portraying the Holy Spirit as being something of the Consciousness of God the Father, he was making the point that the Holy Spirit was not an Internal Phenomena, not a Subconscious Mind, but an External and Spiritually Objective State of Consciousness. “I and my Father are One” speaks to the Unity and Objectivity of the Mystical Experience. Christian Scripture is reluctant to point out that this same Mystical Identity with God is likewise the property of ANY Mystic. Indeed, there is no mystic among the thousands of mystics the World has known who has not had an experience very much akin to the same Mystical Experience that Jesus had. Jesus hardly pretended to be the only Mystic who ever was or ever would be.

But insofar as the Gospels were pressing the argument for the Divinity of Christ, they had to steer every passage toward the idea that Christ was a solitary and unique phenomena. Only Christ could have the Holy Spirit…until He was ready to share it… that would be the Party Line that the Gospels would take.

But after Christ died, then the situation drastically changed. Then the Leaders who co-opted the Christ Movement would need to invoke the cache and appeal of the Holy Spirit for their own uses. They would have to be able to advertise that although Christ was gone, the New Guys were just as good as Jesus ever was, by the Power of the Holy Spirit. This was the point of the Pentecost Story… that the Holy Spirit descended upon a Convention Hall of Christ Movement Survivors, and everyone suddenly had Mystical Knowledge and Miraculous Powers. Christ is Dead, long live the New Christs!

Here the Definition of the Holy Spirit saw its first unfortunate corruption or deviation from the Actual Truth. You see, the Holy Spirit was considered bound to the Spirit of Jesus the Historical Character. But, essentially speaking, Jesus was not the important variable in the equation at all, but God should have been the focal point. Remember, Jesus invoked the Holy Spirit to show his Identity with God Consciousness. Jesus saw what was important. God. That is understandable. But to invoke the Holy Spirit, as the Apostles did, to summon the Jesus Presence, well, I hesitate to call it a ‘corruption’ because it is difficult to imagine how Christ could be considered ‘corrupt’, but remembering the Transcendence of God Almighty we need to remember that anything less than God is less then what it should Be. If Jesus could keep in mind that he was less than God, then we should keep that in mind also. Certainly we can honor the Historical Jesus without having to pretend we have a Second God.

But so much Intellectual Gymnastics has gone into reconciling the Three Gods of the Christian Trinity with the requirement of Monotheism to have just One God. But none of it fools anybody. The rest of the Religious World is convinced that Christianity is Idolizing a Man in the place of God. Yes, Jesus was a Nice Guy, but only God is God.

Oh, just as a point of Theology, sometimes the Holy Spirit is referred to as the “Cosmic Christ” (The Life in All Things where Birth is just an Illusion), but this goes way beyond any reference to the Historical Person of Jesus H. Christ. Any personal history would be a disqualifier in something so Mystically Pure. Maybe we should think of the Cosmic Christ as what happened to Jesus when he finally gave up his personality, his identity, his individuality. The Life in All Things has no special corner, no special preference, no special Name. The Expansion into Infinity can only come at the cost of letting go of one’s little handful.

Anyway, although the Apostles at Pentecost did not get their Spiritual Metaphysics exactly correct, they did see the importance of Spirituality and Miracle in their New Religious Movement. But then we see another problem arise, that if the Holy Spirit really did make a General Appearance at Pentecost, then it was at best only temporary. Like the Parable of the Seeds had warned, the Holy Spirit, when it came, it failed to ‘take’, it failed to thrive. The Vine of the Cosmic Christ wilted and died. How do we know this? Well, we find that in the Book of Acts, which was written to propagandize the New Church and to make the absolute most of anything positive, that it was very slim on Miracles. The Gospels had cited scores of miracles, describing many miracles in close detail. We see nothing even approaching that same treatment in the book of Acts, and the Author, Luke, is the very same! In all the Letters of Paul, there is not a single Miracle… nothing worthy of Christ… a bunch of stretched coincidences… indeed, nothing that could today be certified by the Vatican, and the Vatican today is looser than it has ever been.

Well, yes, after the Gospels, there are indirect references to Miracles, but mostly in the negative context, where we are told of un-named others who were performing Miracles as acts of deception from the Devil. They no longer had any Miracles of their own, and felt as though they needed to criticize the Miracles of others. Remembering what Jesus had said in Mathew Chapter 12, that Miracles can come only from God, what seems most likely is that the Paulist and Peter Factions of the Early Church had somehow gotten outside of the Pall of the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit to keep them spliced into the Living Vine of the Cosmic Christ, their spiritual potency dried up. The Holy Spirit may have been fully vibrant elsewhere, but if there had been any evidentiary Letters or Chronicles to this effect, than they were likely suppressed by the jealous Early Church. We need to remember that the Nicest and Most Religious People are not those who are most likely to Win Religious Wars. And only the Winners get to Publish their books, while deciding what other books need to be collected up for burning, or even just to be left out of next years catalogue. The only Hint of Truth that Future Historians or Theologians can grasp at is the sense of whether or not what has been passed along seems to be either True to Life or True to God. One can hardly imagine the difficulty if the Winners in History prove out to be the Barbarians, and the Winners in Theology the Antichrists.

Now, keep in mind that just because the Real Holy Spirit had abandoned them, it did not mean that they abandoned the idea of exploiting some opportunistic Idea of the Holy Spirit. Where the Holy Spirit had been a Fact, when it was with them, when it left them, they turned it into a Promise. And a Promise can always be the perpetual Tomorrow that never quite ever reaches Today… a Check that never comes due to be cashed. The Holy Spirit would come with Faith, but somehow, it just so happened, nobody ever had quite enough Faith. Faith started as a Promise of Success but became the constant and continual Excuse for Failure. Paul never had to give anybody their money back. He would tell them to try again, and have more Faith next time. It was always their fault.

Let us examine some of the ways some of these Early Church Leaders propagandizing of the Holy Spirit. Peter used it to get away with murder. When he killed that nice young couple, Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, because they were holding out on some small amount of money, he said that the Holy Spirit had miraculous struck them dead. It is not as though he could have easily confessed that he had deliberately smashed their heads in with his walking stick. I suppose some people believed him, but most of the Congregation promptly went out into the streets and elected a New Leader, Stephen, who was as quickly murdered by Paul and his gang of thugs. The Bible points to no connection, then, between Peter and Paul. But we need to wonder why it was that Peter became Paul’s most important and influential patron within the Church after that incident. Peter apparently had no trouble at all in forgiving Paul for that most convenient Sin, of having murdered his biggest political rival.

Where Peter was blunt with his usage of Holy Spirit Propaganda, using it to take the blame for his fits of violence, Paul was significantly more clever and proactive. Paul would pretend to have the absolute Holy Spirit and use it to certify his own Easy Sell Designer Religion, custom cut to appeal to Wealthy Greek Merchants who were willing to pay big for a Religious Dispensation for Free Sin, with Immortality tossed into the Bargain. In all of Paul’s 14 Books – more than half of the New Testament – he never quotes Jesus even once. Jesus was not selling anything, and so Paul had no idea what to do with any of it. But Paul, needing the famous and prestigious Jesus Trademark to give his own Product any perceived value in the eyes of his Shopping Public, appealed to the Power of the Holy Spirit, which he claimed over and over again was as good as Jesus Himself. Paul went so far as to claim that he was the virtual Voice of Jesus, and he largely got away with it because Jesus was too dead to argue back.

The Church soon came to regret that they ever brought up the whole idea of the Holy Spirit. They allowed Paul to get away with it, because he brought in so many wealthy converts. But then other people also decided that they could do exactly what Paul had done, that is, start their own Congregations and make themselves seem like important Religious Figures simply by claiming to be. That is the Way with successful Business Plans… they are soon copied over and over again. There is never just one Hamburger.

Oh, and there is also the matter of the Genuine Holy Spirit. Just because there are many opportunistic fake Mystics does not preclude the existence of real and true Mystics… what were called Gnostics back then.

But the Early Church saw the Fakes as direct Rivals, and then they were embarrassed by the True Mystics because their was no painless way of explaining why Doctrines did not match up. Much of the Early Church’s time and treasure went into defending territory and Doctrine. It was all a huge bother for them. In any case they decided that this business of the Holy Spirit would have to be put to an end.

The Church was to institutionalize its Prohibition against the Holy Spirit, at the same time that they published their Bible. The Counsel at Nicea issued an order that forthwith there could not possibly be any further Revelations from God. God was not Killed, but He would be gagged. Anybody pretending to the Holy Spirit would be punished for it.

Well, they should have known that any Absolute Prohibition against Divine Revelation could not hold indefinitely. Only an Atheist can believe that God can stay silent forever. If there really is Something like a Holy Spirit, then it would continue to assert itself.

The Church had several ways of dealing with these Mystics of the Holy Spirit. Because it seemed so easy at first, the Mystics could be dismissed as Heretics and then killed. But this tactic was soon found to be complicated by the Public’s remembering these victims as Martyrs. Then there was all the resentments that the violence entailed. Also, Resort to Violence brought the Military into Influence, forcing the Bishops to share power with Governors and Generals, and the soldiers cost so much money. So in time the Bishops learned to respond to the Holy Spirit with a more measured approach. Mystics would be allowed to set up their own Religious Communities, but they would have to swear to celibacy, so they could not breed and multiply, and they would have to agree to walls and isolation so they could not influence the greater Catholic Public. Well, there arose many a Saint like the proverbial lamps that could not be hidden in the dark. Even from behind their Monastery Walls they exercised great influence in Medieval Europe and even later. But still, the Edict of Nicea still pertained, that the Doctrine of the Catholic Church was fixed, and no new Revelation from God would be recognized or accepted. The Saints could influence Society and Culture, but the Church itself would hold firm against them, and in every important aspect of Doctrine the Church would persist in ignoring its most gifted and enlightened Spiritualists. But because the Public grumbled that its favorite Saints were being treated with such apparent contempt and disdain by the Church, the Bishops decided upon a further Compromise Formula for dealing with its Saints and their Holy Spirit – they would call it “Private Revelation”. Now, the way it works is that it is okay for Private Revelation to agree with Canonical Teachings and Scripture, but it cannot differ or amend it in even the slightest degree. The Church keeps these Guidelines in mind when publishing the Histories of its Saints and their ‘Private Revelations’, and anything said or done that might be embarrassing to the Official Catholicism of the Bishops and Cardinals is allowed to be dropped off and forgotten.

I have always found that very disturbing, that rather than lifting up their Doctrines to the Standards set by their Christlike Saints, they strain and filter their Saints through a Doctrine that they had committed themselves to in their ignorant and benighted infancy without any real thought as to the moral, political or spiritual consequences.